“Just to say, your reaction hasn’t put the warm and fuzzies into my emotions and given me peace of mind,” I joked, but the tone the words were said in was flat.
Standing up, he moved to the sink and leaned on his hands as he stared out the window.
“The letter’s from Jeremy Kelly like Sid Osborne said, but it’s who the guy is that’s the issue. Apparently, your mom was in a relationship with Jeremy’s dad thirty-three years ago, and he’s her kid. She left him with his dad because she didn’t want kids and didn’t want to be tied down.”
Of all the words I’d expected… none of them were those ones.
“Pardon?”
“He’s claiming he’s your brother.”
The pain I felt hearing those words was familiar. I felt them every time I heard the word brother and relived the fact I’d never see mine again. Someone claiming to be my… brother… it was like someone was stabbing me in the chest.
“He’s lying.”
“Baby,” Carter said gently, squatting down beside me, “he’s enclosed a copy of his birth certificate with your mom’s name on it and has offered to have a DNA test to prove it. We don’t know if he’s lying or not until we get all of that settled.”
I didn’t even realize I was crying until he wiped under my eye with his thumb. “Talk to me, Nome.”
“Callum was my brother. He’s four years older than me, Carter, which means she would have given birth and dumped him almost immediately to have Cal. She never mentioned another kid—not that she ever spoke to us unless it was to tell us to fuck off or go and die—and…” I stopped, trailing off when I realized I’d been about to say I couldn’t see her abandoning a kid like that.
I could, though.
She and Dad had abandoned us for weeks at a time, leaving us with nothing to eat and to take care of ourselves from a young age. If it hadn’t been for Cal, I don’t know what would have happened to me.
“Shit, she totally would have done that,” I sobbed, choking on air as I gasped it in through the pressure in my chest. “She hated all of us. Callum deserved the world and for everyone to love him, and she didn’t even do that for him.”
Strong arms picked me up, and then I was being carried until Carter got us to where he wanted us to be and sat down, holding me tightly against his chest and giving me the security I needed as I cried for the millionth time over all of it.
My childhood. Having my brother and idolizing him. The day I found out I was going to be an aunt and all of the hopes and dreams I’d had after it for all of us. Losing Callum and having to get to the hospital to see Shanti while every part of me broke into dust inside. Knowing Cal never had a birthday, a Father’s Day, a Christmas, a Thanksgiving, or a Halloween with his daughter. Knowing my parents never loved him for the fantastic person he was.
And now finding out I could potentially have another brother out there when I didn’t have Callum.
I don’t know how long I cried for, but when I woke up later, it felt like I’d been hit in the head with a sledgehammer, and I was even crying in my sleep.
Rolling onto my back, I stared up at the ceiling, grateful that Carter had turned the light on in the hallway, so the room wasn’t too dark for me to see. I didn’t want to think about the letter and information at this time of night because it’d end up with me getting zero sleep, but it was fucking hard. I was human, for fuck’s sake—we couldn’t just switch our brains off at will. Well, unless it was in high school and during a science class, but that might have been the monotonous droning of the teacher.
A heavy weight settled across my abdomen, almost making me scream, until Carter mumbled, “Can’t sleep, baby?”
Given that I was lying down and he was beside me, a lot was lost in the translation of the shrug I gave him back.
Using the pad of his thumb to move some hair off my cheek, he spent a moment breezing it over my jaw in a soothing motion. Usually, something like that would have me batting at it to go away, but right now, I needed it.
“No one’s forcing you to answer the letter, Nome, so don’t feel pressured. It’s purely down to what you want to do and what you want to happen. I know it’s confusing right now, but you’re not going to get the answers to the million questions in your brain immediately.”
Chewing on my lower lip while I mulled over what he said, I had to begrudgingly admit he was right. “Furthermore, if you don’t sleep, you’ll exhaust yourself and feel even worse.”